Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Bloomberg's Legacy

Bill Keller with a NYT op ed on Bloomberg’s legacy, with
well-deserved kudos for all he’s done for NYC schools:

Bloomberg’s most
consequential and controversial unfinished business is the public school
system. He set the schools on a hopeful course: stabilizing the system under
mayoral control, raising and enforcing standards, giving parents more options,
among them charter schools that actually work. There is much more to do.
Schools are the work of a generation, not an administration. Bloomberg’s great
achievement was taking on the prevailing defeatist view that urban schools were
unfixable.

The mayor’s third
term, which began with a broken term-limits promise that many New Yorkers have
not forgiven, was less successful than his first two, and it felt less
successful than it actually was because the city has developed a bit of
Bloomberg fatigue. By now, many New Yorkers are ready for a little more
consensus, a little less lecturing, a little more attention to those at the
bottom. But Bloomberg leaves behind a great 21st-century city, a dauntingly
high bar for his successor and a pretty good argument for noblesse oblige.